Married On Valentine's Day: - Carl Jung Depth Psychology

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Married on Valentine’s Day:.

Married on Valentine’s Day:

The couple met when she was sixteen years old (some sources say fifteen) and he was twenty one. They were married on 14 February 1903 (Valentine’s Day) seven years after they first met. Together they had five children: Agathe, Gret, Franz, Marianne and Helene.

When Emma died Carl Jung carved a stone in her name, “She was the foundation of my house.” He is also said to have cried “She was a queen! She was a queen!” while mourning for her. The inscription Jung put on Emma’s grave was “Oh vase, sign of devotion and obedience.”

Carl Jung wrote to Erich Neumann at the time of Emma’s death:

Dear Neumann:

Deepest thanks for you heartfelt letters…I am sorry that I can only set down these dry words, but the shock I have experienced is so great that I can neither concentrate nor recover my power of speech.

I would have liked to tell the heart that you have opened to me in friendship that two days before the death of my wife I had what one can only call a great illumination which, like a flash of lightning, lit up a centuries-old secret that was embodied in her and had exerted an unfathomable influence on my life.

I can only suppose that the illumination came from my wife, who was then mostly in a coma, and that the tremendous lighting up and release of insight had a retroactive effect upon her and was one reason why she could die such a painless and royal death.

The quick and painless end-only five days between the final diagnosis and death-and this experience have been a great comfort to me. But the stillness and audible silence about me, the empty air and infinite distance are hard to bear. ~Carl Jung letter to Erich Neumann on November 27, 1955.

Carl Jung’s Vision shortly after Emma’s death:

I experienced this objectivity once again later on. That was after the death of my wife. I saw her in a dream which was like a vision. She was in her prime, perhaps about 30, and wearing the dress which had been made for her many years before by my cousin the medium.

It was perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever worn. Her expression was neither joyful nor sad, but rather, objectively wise and understanding, without the slightest emotional reaction, as though she were beyond the midst of affects.

I knew that it was not she, but a portrait she had made or commissioned for me. It contained the beginning of our relationship, the events of fifty-three years of marriage, and the end of her life also. Face to face with such wholeness one remains speechless, for it can scarcely be comprehended.

The objectivity which I experienced in this dream and in the visions is part of a completed individuation. It signifies detachment from the valuations and from what we call emotional ties. In general, emotional ties are very important to human beings.

But they still contain projections, and it is essential to withdraw these projections in order to attain to oneself and to objectivity. Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the other person, and that makes him and ourselves unfree.

Objective cognition lies hidden behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be the central secret. Only through objective cognition is the real coniunctio possible. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections.